If you want to increase your sales, then improve your data. It sounds simple, but the research backs it up, especially for B2B sales.
A study by McKinsey found that analytics are playing an increasingly important role in B2B sales. The majority of high performing firms use data effectively, and these firms are over 15% more likely to do so than their peers.
The evidence is clear: teams with the best data sell more.
What’s driving this value? Let’s take a closer look at why data can make such a difference to your sales.
Without data, B2B sales can often feel like a stab in the dark. You’ve got something to offer, but you don’t know if you’re offering it to the right people. You can end up down one blind alley after another, wasting time going after prospects that are never going to come through.
Using detailed data to inform your sales strategy is like turning the lights on. It allows you to create specific target customer profiles and align these to your aims. So you can go after the leads that matter.
We’ve found using employee and turnover data particularly valuable in creating these profiles and growing sales. These two key metrics help you to zone in on exactly who you should be talking to.
Here’s two examples of how it works.
Let’s say you’re a small equipment leasing business, and you’re looking for construction companies to sell to. From experience, you’ve learned that companies with turnovers below £1m are too small. Those with turnovers over £5m usually start to purchase their own equipment and often aren’t worth pursuing.
Now you know your target market: those with turnovers between £1m-£5m. With the right data to identify those firms, you can focus your sales activity and massively improve your success rate.
Employee numbers works similarly. Let’s take an HR consultancy business. Again, firms with fewer than ten firms aren’t likely to need your services, while those with over 50 will most often have in-house capability.
So you want to know about firms with 10-50 employees. And of course, you want up-to-date information, because firms grow or fail all the time.
But collecting and updating this data takes time and requires expertise. It’s not what your sales team should be doing, and that’s where Red Flag Alert can help.
At Red Flag Alert, we put over 100 data points for 6.5m businesses through our algorithm to identify the key characteristics of firms. We’ve carefully crafted and refined this algorithm over 13 years, using billions of data points, to improve its predictive capability and accuracy.
This provides us with a valuable set of conclusions based on a huge number of different variables. Constantly updated information on a company’s balance sheet, health, age, sector, ratio analysis and more, all help us to accurately predict turnover and employee numbers.
Our B2B database is the UK’s freshest, with a million changes and 30,000 businesses added every month. Your sales team won’t need to waste time updating their CRM because our API will automatically do that for them. This gifts them more time to get out there and make important sales. It also reduces the opportunities for human error, improving accuracy.
The database has over 40 searchable fields, allowing you and your sales team to be specific with who you talk to. Not only will you know who to target, you’ll know all about their business so you can engage in an informed and tailored way.
See how data can boost your sales results. Connect with me on LinkedIn, on 0344 412 6699, or at richard.west@redflagalert.com to set up a friendly, informal chat or meeting.